


the white snow red as strawberries

by marquis



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, this is really short but i hope my point gets across?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 04:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marquis/pseuds/marquis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quick drabble based on Birdy's cover of "White Winter Hymnal".<br/>The one where Louis is Michael, and Liam watches him fall from heaven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the white snow red as strawberries

_And Michael, you would fall, and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime._

\--

The last time he’d seen Louis had been the last time anyone saw him, although he hadn’t known that at the time. No one had known. How could they? It’s not like he would have told them.

(Had he said, it wouldn’t have happened. Had they known, it would have been prevented. Because there had been no knowledge, it could not have been prevented, and thus the human condition becomes suffering at the hands of Time, of the flirtation between fate and coincidence. It was coincidence that he hadn’t said, and coincidence that no one had heard. Because of this, it was fate that he would fall. Perhaps, after all, this was not only the curse of being human; perhaps it applied to everything, including the plants and the animals and the trees. Including them, infallible though they might have been, once.)

It had been the drawing that did it, Liam was sure. It had been the image burned on his eyelids as he slipped away and drifted down, down, down, into the abyss of manmade destruction. A picture of a man with wings, scribbled in black on ashen paper. A picture of any one of them, feathers falling from their wings as they struggled.

Was it meant to go up? Was it meant to go down? Louis never said. He spent day after day watching that picture, awaiting some sort of change, for Icarus to listen to his father even though they knew he never would. Even though he was destined to fall, over and over again, no matter how long and hard he strived to reach the top.

Louis was the brightest of them, anyhow. They all knew it. He had been modeled in such a likeness, made to be such a magnificent creature, that it was near impossible not to look at him and see your own imperfections against the innocent curve of his spine, the muscles of his arm or the glint of sunlight off of his impish smile. It was impossible not to admire – to _adore_ – his laugh, like the sounds of windchimes on a summer day.

And yet he was the most human of them all. It was he that could feel the pain they felt, that could look down on bloody battlefields and weep for the fallen, that wished most for redemption and the eternal happiness of the old and the dying. It was he who felt what humans might have, had they thousands of years to feel it.

So it was he that fell, burning brighter than a star. He fell like the feathers that drifted off of his wings, fell like snowflakes in a lazy winter snow, a sunset in the middle of the night. It was him that looked up at his home and watched it fade to constellations and clouds in front of the heavenly moon, hands held out listlessly as if some part of him regretted the decision he had to make.

He had been the loveliest, the fairest, every fairy tale ever told. He had led them on their quests, taught them all how to be good and to behave. He had charmed his way into being the best, the epitome of everything they wished they could be. And now he was gone. And now they wept.

Not even their tears could glitter like the stardust Louis left in his wake.

Perhaps it had been a lesson to them all. Perhaps it had been done to teach them how to feel, one final class before graduating to a new level of divinity. This was Louis’ way of telling them that they could be human, too, could feel horrible and heartbreaking things that only came when you knew that Time himself was counting your numbers, watching your clock tick slowly away from where he sat, in distant mountains, on other planets, in faraway galaxies that even _they_ had not seen.

Or maybe it had been something else that caused him to drift off, to go where every man but no one of their kind had ever traveled. Maybe something else had been picking at him, pulling the meat from his bones and the light from his eyes like Prometheus’s vulture, like every darkness that humans had ever imagined. Maybe something else made him feel so strongly that he felt he must give up something so delicate as an eternity.

For when Liam had seen him last, when he spoke his last words before stepping off and leaving them all behind, the picture in his hands had looked a lot like Liam himself.

Maybe Louis hadn’t wanted to feel anything more, anything that he was unfamiliar with.

**Author's Note:**

> Really short, but I'm actually ridiculously proud? Also coming to the realization that a lot of my stories relate to death and religion, which is kind of odd considering I have never actually had to deal with death and I am not at all religious. These things happen. Feedback is appreciated, but even just reading it earns you plenty of my love. <3


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